Snow better here than at home

Once again I have set a record. In 1983, I arrived in Honolulu the day before Hawaii’s worst hurricane in more than 30 years. Yesterday, I was present for the biggest snowstorm in Tucson in the past couple of decades, almost an inch in the city and almost twice that amount in the mountains overlooking the city, where I have chosen to spend three weeks in isolation at the end of a three-mile dead-end dirt road.

For those of you checking to see whether they’ve clicked on some sort of meteorological blog by mistake, I hasten to assure you this is definitely a golf story — Tucson is the site of this week’s Accenture Match Play Championship, and yesterday they were trying to play in the snow, in the desert.

The men from the PGA were acting like boys — building snowmen, having snowball fights — Bubba nailed Ricky Fowler with a snowball when he wasn’t looking. Garcia driver-slapped a frozen tee marker after an errant drive, snapping it in two.

It has snowed three times in the PGA Tour’s last 10 years of tournaments, two of which were at Dove Mountain on Tucson’s northwest corner. It was an even rarer occasion for some of the players. Branden Grace had never seen snow before and was playing with it like a kid.

Any reader who is planning on spending a lot of dinero on an upcoming trip should seriously check with me before committing. If I’m planning the same basic trip you may want to reschedule for better weather.